Web Traffic Fraud.com

If you are trying to understand more about web click fraud, you need to know the difference between a ‘low-value’ click vs. clicks that are truly fraudulent. A ‘low-value’ click can be a set of repeated clicks received from sites that are irrelevant to the keyword being advertised. These sites would generate a lot of clicks, but the conversion rates would be abnormally low. Major types of sites that generate these ‘low value’ clicks are domain parking sites as well as community oriented sites or social media sites.

Community sites are those which pay users to visit the site and post some information. All of these sites participate in PPC programs and some of them even openly admit that they pay users to browse and click on ads (click farm or incentive clicks). But you as an advertiser should be weary of these sites as none of these ‘paid clicks’ would lead to actual business for your products or services.

A quick search on the internet for keyword, “work from home” will present a plethora of work at home opportunities where stay at home moms can earn a monthly mortgage payment clicking on ads for a small revenue share. Think about it, an army of 1000 stay at home mom’s clicking on text link ads all day while watching soup opera’s. I force not to be reckoned with!

Domain Parking is yet another problem related to web traffic fraud. Recently Google has permitted domain registrars to place ads on home pages of registered but ‘parked’ sites. This has started generating huge revenue for the domain registrars at your expense. People who own domain names earlier did not get any revenue from those sites. However now that this has become common practice, some people are actually hoarding domain names for this purpose alone. Some of these people who literally own quite a lot of domain names make millions of dollars in ad revenue alone. Traffic from misspelled domain names (users mistyping letters) is a industry within itself.

Research has also shown that another place where low value clicks originate from is social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.com. These sites promote quite a lot of genuine advertisers and therefore it makes it even more difficult to identify the web traffic frauds that originate from these sites. However, certain businesses definitely are not conducive to advertising on social media. One example is business to business products or services. Again studies have shown that most clicks originating from these sites were made with the intention to generate revenue and not for making a purchase.

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com

If you are a small business owner who has decided on relying on PPC advertising as a part of your online marketing campaign, then you need to know how to protect yourselves against web traffic fraud. This is especially important in areas such as electronic cyberspace where the competition in the online market place is too fierce to ignore.

Web traffic fraud can cause a devastating financial impact on your business operations. And like any other catastrophes it is better to prevent click fraud or at least identify it as soon as it occurs and even take corrective actions before it occurs.

As we know search engines like Google which run popular PPC networks such as Adwords are aware of the growing menace of web traffic fraud that cost its customers millions of dollars each year. There are several inbuilt mechanisms in these programs which handle stuff like automated script based click generators. And the search engines try their best not to invoice these clicks to the advertiser. However some kinds of fraud escape even their watchful eyes and filters and therefore as an advertiser you need to do what it takes to protect yourselves against undetectable click fraud, rather than trusting the search engine to handle.
After all its your hard earned dollars that are at jeopardy.

DIY: Doing it yourselves entails that you have the technical prowess to identify click fraudsters. However, it could be really difficult to go through thousands of IP addresses, domain names etc. and log files, especially after heavy web traffic spikes that an attack can cause.
Outsource It: There are several vendors who offer great tools to prevent web traffic frauds. It would be a great idea to purchase these tools or hire an expert outsider to do the fraud prevention on your behalf.

There are certain things that you should keep in mind while selecting your vendor for fraud prevention. The first and foremost is that the service is reliable and reputable. Ask for frequent tracking reports so that you know what they are doing. Also get a vendor who has got positive feedback about their solution’s effectiveness. And keep in mind many third party ad tracking service providers skimp on fraud detecting in their system. Usually it’s a addon to ad tracking not a proactive fraud detection system.

Once you identify that a fraud has occurred, immediately notify your advertising network provider. Possibly you will be reimbursed in time – but make sure you have stringent no nonsense log data to back up your suspected fraudulent clicks, otherwise that money will be gone forever.

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© 2010 WebTrafficFraud.com